This is a luv thing...or is it?

An old conversation gets refreshed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, love is a-many-splendored-thing and all that jazz. Love sucks, but we all fell for it like suckers. Even our old dear friend Candido Apokalyps who back in The Scenester’s fourth issue declared that “coupling was the recluse of the ignorant” and “for chrissake don’t insist that we do it for love period!” wound up eating his words. The last we heard he was exiled to the burbs somewhere driving a wagon with three kids in tow. That’s irony for you.

It might be a generational thing. As the old axiom goes, “a man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart; a man who is still a socialist at 40 either has no head or pays no taxes”, so it might be with love and marriage. But, having reached the mature age of the mid-life crisis kind, what lessons if any has life taught us, dear scenesters? Are there any nuggets of truth that can be picked up from having walked the earth a bit longer than your typical young adult? Apart from acquiring a beer gut, love handles, man boobs, and grey hair, is there any wisdom to be imparted from one generation to the next?

After The Scenester stumbled on the precarious terrain of Manila’s dating scene in its maiden issue with Jetboy’s anthropological undercover mission (going on a blind date with one fine specimen of the city’s social elite, a very eligible bachelorette), the project of starting a conversation on this essential, existential and eternal topic was given a name, 100% Love Factor, and it was given its own space in this publication.

What do women want?

Blue Boy drew first blood by asking, “what do women want?” in a piece called Woe, Man, a tongue in cheek autobiographic portrait of a young man as a suitor wanting to get laid with any girl who had “breath” haphazardly navigating the maze set up by those on the opposing side (see the third issue). His scientific predilections were on display as he sought to distil romance down to a universal formula or set of principles which if adhered to would improve the chances of success by a significant margin (note to reader: he subsequently found what he was looking for).

He was summarily rebuffed by an articulate reader named Vixen for treating women as sexual prey to be lured into his snare via his charming, suave moves (see Scenester #04). She countered that rather than simply obeying her biologically-inherited emotional desire for man's protection and sustenance, a vestige of her evolutionary determined role as domestic child-rearer, the modern woman had other options. Sticking up for the sistahs, she performed a clinical castration of Blue Boy’s arguments and shoved them in their rightful place.

But then, simultaneously Candido had an answer when he surprised us all with a titillating follow-up piece controversially titled, Woman Deconstructed: Why You Should Forget Inner Beauty and Go for Big Tits. If Blue Boy was a curmudgeon, Candido chose a different tack, that of the sensitive but ineffectual (read: castrated) male lashing out at the big feminist swindle. If Vixen herself could not answer the question, what do women want (like Mother Nature with its cycles, she said what women want often changes), then the role of the man is to convince her. And in that game, the alpha male reigns supreme.

Aye, there's the rub

Candido was quick to point out this inconsistency (or in his words, lack of integrity) on the part of women (Vixen might have inadvertently cemented the fickle-minded nature of her gender). It was built in the analogy used by Vixen herself. When carried to its logical conclusion, woman (like Mother Nature) needed to be either "tamed" by male dominance or "worshipped" by his subservience. This unacceptable dichotomy lay at the heart of Candido's disillusionment.

Yes, he said, women should be treated as equals with respect and pursued for their brains as well as their bodies, but (and this is where Candido reveals himself to be an outlier and maladjusted representative of the male population) having chosen the lonely road of celibacy out of disgust for the way the game was played, Candido realized that if the game was to be played at all, it was best “performed” by an unapologetic virile man with clear intentions  ("getting laid") and the ability to get what he wants ("big tits"), rather than an awkward geek whose sexual energies were diffused (see Of Flats and Flukes in Issue #06, for a sample of his clumsy misadventures in the bedroom).

Jetboy in issue five sought to break apart the bi-polar world constructed by Candido in which individuals were either players or non-players by creating a multi-polar typography consisting of players, serial monogamists, avowed singles, and so forth (incidentally, Jetboy seems to have recently become a "settler" himself). I then tried to talk about the effects of women’s liberation through the pill and the post-gender world of transvestism and trans-sexuality in the seventh issue.

That is where the conversation trailed off until its resumption here.

In the interim, there was a profound change of scenery beginning with the Lolita act of Britney, Lindsay and Miley, followed by the billionaire bimbo branding of Paris and the yummy mummy number performed by the cosmetically altered Demi. The new era can be bound up in two lines, uttered by a character in the movie Crazy Stupid Love, which goes, “The war between the sexes is over. We won the second women started doing pole dancing for exercise.” The male dominance argument seems to have won.

From post-modern to pseudo-modern love

In the future, if one extrapolates from this trend, a person’s “f*ckability index” (pardon the French) will be constructed through social networking enabled devices and read real time by prospective mates at the point of eyeballing. This is how Gary Shteyngart’s dystopic world of the future operates in the novel Super Sad True Love Story. It is not beyond the realms of possibility given the way technology is influencing human interaction. It is not even science fiction (you know, given what they say about science fiction becoming science fact) since we already have the tools to make such a system functional.

If the women’s movement and birth-control enabled the “weaker sex” to grow out of its role as traditionally defined in society, in the new age where people seek romance through "reality-based" platforms, love will be driven by "compatibility scores" and “audience participation”. Gender equality might have been delivered by libertarian political ideology, but the triumph of liberal market capitalism with its Darwinian code subverted it.

It means that love or the “production” of it becomes a mere franchise or commodity that can be bartered and traded for commercial gain (the Kardashian nuptials being a prime example of this--see inset photo). Of course the notion of engaging in social and sexual intercourse for material benefit is as old as time. Biological programming and environmental constraints led our ancestors to compete for coital rights to pass on their genetic code to the next generation. 

It wasn’t we who chose our mates, it was our genes. From our genes, it became our parents based on tribal or class affiliation. In the post-modern age, it became whatever we chose to define it as. From there, it is swiftly moving towards a pseudo-reality where everyone bases their decisions on an "audience" or on "the judges' comments". If the concept of total transparency that Mark Zuckerberg champions ever succeeds, people will be displaying their credit status and statements of net worth on Facebook via direct link to their savings and credit accounts to help with the "screening" process.

Which brings us back ironically full circle to the original question posed by our comrade Blue Boy, what do women (and men) want? In the future, it should be easy to Google the answer and base it on the actual “stats”. The dating scene has become a lot more interesting or disheartening depending on your position. So, is this a luv thing? ...Possibly, but love as defined not by us anymore but by our “followers”.